topics

Meta

Some time ago I wrote an small XNA-app with 2 custom shaders. One of them would re-render each frame of a playing video as ASCII characters, based on the luminance of the image. And the ASCII characters would be rendered in full lime green color, to really evoke the feeling of the old monitor I started out with back in the days…

For fun I upgraded the project to VS2013 and decided to ASCII-fy some recent trailers I found on YouTube. Picking trailers removes the issue with Copyright-strikes against the YT account that series and movies would land me…

As a software developer with a side-interest in making game [prototypes] and mods I not only play (and enjoy) games I also follow the dev-press and happenings behind the scene for different game projects. This includes for years following John Carmacks .plan, reading postmortems on Gamasutra and even purchasing licenses to multiple game-engines without ever having a plan to release anything publicly. Or, I used to visit Gamasutra a lot. Their suppression of voices that doesn’t toe the line has forced me to rethink that. And that is in part what this post is about.

Kickstarter seem like the perfect tool for small to medium projects that need a little help to get over the first hurdle of entrepreneurship, being able to gather enough money to have; a first proper assembly run of a new hardware gadget, be able to hire a couple of good artists to finish off that great game-idea or hire studio-time in a professional studio to be able to record that new album the world deserves.
So why is it such a hotbed for scams and project failures?

As an early backer of Oculus Rift, and owner of the DK2 – as well as of a PlayStation 4, I was pleasantly surprised when Sony last year announced they where also aiming to release a virtual reality headset. This would mean both that VR would get the broad push to go mass-market it needed in terms of having big players that had the expertise to actually deliver hardware to a consumer but also guaranteed that there would be a technology-race to improve and beat the competition by several major players in the industry (and that is great for the consumers in the long run).